You can use a program called VOB2MPG(free) or VideoRedo (buy) or use any number of programs to encode to another format like divx or h.264 (XVID4PSP or Autogk or Handbrake or Fairuse Wizard or many others).

Don't know of any that will work on multiple directories at once though. Need to do one at a time.
Jason

What about the following - I wanted to convert my movies to try and save some space. I want to keep the same aspect ratio - if it is an older 4:3 or newer 16:9 movie. I tried I robot with Handbrake, xvid4psp and when I play it back it no longer is 16:9.

What about the following - I wanted to convert my movies to try and save some space. I want to keep the same aspect ratio - if it is an older 4:3 or newer 16:9 movie. I tried I robot with Handbrake, xvid4psp and when I play it back it no longer is 16:9.

My guess would be it is either the profile you are using to encode with (it might be cropping the resolution to fit a mp3 player) or your tivo is set to either fullscreen or zoom. The dvds I have converted with handbrake (constant quality) or XVID4PSP (also some sort of constant rate factor profile) all play fine when set to panel/letterbox on tivo. (It is enitirely possible I have only converted 16:9 dvds.) Make sure that whatever profile you are using is only cropping the letterboxing, not the video itself.

I set the Tivo to Full screen and my main copy of IRobot shows up as 2.35 : 1. My ripped Handbrake all default settings for Constant Quality is stretched and fills the screen which now makes sense. If I put the Tivo in panel mode then the movie looks correct.

But I am confused on why the main copy of the movie shows up fine and the HB rip doesn't. Anyone have an answer for this one?

But I am confused on why the main copy of the movie shows up fine and the HB rip doesn't. Anyone have an answer for this one?

I am not sure what you mean by main copy. Is this just the VOB rip converted to MPEG2? The borders might be included in the video. Does it look the same if you use Full Screen, Panel or Zoom?

Jason

P.S. The more that I think about it, I think that this is most likely exactly what you are talking about. DVDs (I believe) really only allow two aspect ratios, 4:3 and 16:9. Anything else needs to be padded. 2:35:1 aspect ratio video is put in a 16:9 box with letterboxing to fill the dead space.

I am not sure what you mean by main copy. Is this just the VOB rip converted to MPEG2? The borders might be included in the video. Does it look the same if you use Full Screen, Panel or Zoom?

Jason

P.S. The more that I think about it, I think that this is most likely exactly what you are talking about. DVDs (I believe) really only allow two aspect ratios, 4:3 and 16:9. Anything else needs to be padded. 2:35:1 aspect ratio video is put in a 16:9 box with letterboxing to fill the dead space.

OK direct rip of the movie from dvd shrink. I can have the Tivo in full mode and it plays fine. If I play the Handbrake converted file it fills the screen so then I put it panel and it looks normal.

My guess would be it is either the profile you are using to encode with (it might be cropping the resolution to fit a mp3 player) or your tivo is set to either fullscreen or zoom. The dvds I have converted with handbrake (constant quality) or XVID4PSP (also some sort of constant rate factor profile) all play fine when set to panel/letterbox on tivo. (It is enitirely possible I have only converted 16:9 dvds.) Make sure that whatever profile you are using is only cropping the letterboxing, not the video itself.

Jason

Which settings do you use in Handbrake or Xvid4psp?
Then do you send them to your Tivo or Stream the movie?

For both pieces of software (Handbrake and XVID4PSP), I am converting to H.264 (.mp4) and pushing the resulting video to my Tivo with wmcbrine's pytivo. With handbrake, I have used a few different settings. I started with the Constant Quality profile, checked decomb, detelecine, set the quality to somewhere to 61-65%, changed the deblock to 0,0 and set the keyint to 24 and the min-keyint to 2 (this adds more I-frames which seems to make the FF smoother on the tivo). I had some DVDs that came out with widely varying bitrates using the constant quality profile (1600-->3600), so lately I have settled on a 2-pass encoding with a 2000 kbps target. The results are very good and the files sizes are much more consistent.

I really only use XVID4PSP when I have DVDs that have closed captions rather than subtitles (I always burn the text into the video). I extract the closed captions with ccExtract and then convert the video with the Constant Rate Factor profile (I think that is what it is called) using a CRF of 18.5. I really haven't toyed with the other settings much with XVID4PSP.

Hi Everyone, I'm new to this board. Originally looking for problems associated with HD Tivo displaying white streaks on dark background. Came across this thread about using the Tivo as a Juke box and thought I'd share some of my thoughts.

On and off I have been looking for a way to rip DVDs and store them on the Tivo for easy access. This is good usage for my series 1 Tivo since I can no longer use its analog tuner to record OTA contents. The issues I came across in trying to use the Tivo as a jukebox is the amount of time it takes to rip/encode the DVDs into the proper format and then having to get them onto the Tivo (no ethernet port on the series 1). Economically, it is still cheaper to store the movies I want to keep on DVDRs than it is to keep them on the Tivo hard drive (assuming $70 for a 1TB drive a 7GB movie will cost about $0.50).

As far as convenience goes I found that leaving the movies on DVDs with full access to chapter selection and subtitles more to meet my needs. The only issue is how to access my DVD collection easily. After some research surfing the web, I came to the solution of connecting my 5 disc Panasonic DVD changer to a AV distribution device called the BOCS Xtender. You can do a search at Amazon.com and see my review there. The interesting part about the Xtender is the ability to playback your contents such as DVD and Tivo recordings anywhere there is a TV in your house without the need for a set-top box at every TV. Only complain I have with the Xtender is the lack of ability to distribute high def contents but it does a pretty good job with standard def DVDs. I am seriously thinking about upgrading to the Sony 400 disc DVD changer DVPCX995V.

Ok, that was very interesting, next question is:
I have a Network Attached storage device with DVD .iso files ripped to it for storage. I can use a Patriot Box Office device to watch these movies on any TV in the house and streaming the iso file from the NAS.

Is there a way to Stream the .iso file from the NAS through the Tivo for playback?

I have a Tivo Premiere and a HD. I have a Windows Home Server and would like to (re)create a Video Library of my DVD collection. I had installed pyTivo before and used MetaGenerator. I am considering getting the Tivo Desktop Plus this time instead. Does Tivo Desktop run on Windows Home Server and is there a companion Metagenerator for it?

I am trying to get some DVD titles to my Tivo HD. I don't need perfect picture quality and I want to save space on the Tivo, so I want to transcode the files to MPEG-4.

I used DVDfab to rip the title and selected the output as mp4. I sent the file to the Tivo with pyTivo and as expected, the file was sent without pyTivo transcoding it.

The title plays on the Tivo, but it freezes if I try to fast forward. Any ideas what would cause that or what I could do to fix it? Thanks.

Well, I was experimenting and tried some encoding options in DVDFab. I selected no deinterlace and 2 pass encoding. The file created plays fine on the Tivo. Fast forward, rewind, etc. work well now. And the file size is a reasonable 500 MB instead of the 2 GB for the MPEG-2 file. I did not experiment to determine which of the options made the difference because I don't really care how long the encoding takes, so I'll just stick with these settings.

Since this is a sticky and not likely to be updated considering the last activity of the OP I want to say to anyone using this guide to install pyTivo....please don't. Some of the information is out of date and using the information provided in this thread will only serve to confuse you later on when you need to update pyTivo. The version mentioned is years out of date, no longer updated or supported and does not work well with newer TiVo's out of the box.